Where My Clients Are Coming From (The Mind-Blowing Edition)

Where My Clients Are Coming From (The Mind-Blowing Edition) life is simpler when you plow around the stumps by thingspeoplesay At the start of each month, I take some time to figure out my finances while looking at my current client load (thats what she said) my client projections for the next 2 or 3 months. Thanks to the work Ive been doing with Thekla Richter, I recently decided to block an entire day yes, one whole workday (weekends dont count!) for a Business Building Day. This is the day I get to do, well, whatever Ive been wanting to do around my business, whether its finance stuff or blogging stuff or scanning stuff or anything else I freakin want. Ive blocked it out on the first workday of each month so I can make sure theres always room to do my finances from the month before. Well, Dec 1 was my first Business Building Day! I (finally!) rolled over my 401(k) into a SEP-IRA with Fidelity (they have their own small business department! and they walked me through the rollover process without laughing at my dumb questions! and they helped me figure out which IRA to get!), got up-to-date with my finances and my client load (hehe), and then I stared down the question Ive been pondering for a while: Where the heck are my clients consultation calls coming from? Now, Im not a total dummy (just a semi-dummy). Ive asked this question to every client consultation call-er for a long time now, and I always pay attention to the response and say, Ah! or Interesting! or Sweet! or How nice! I even check my Google Analytics for my site to see where my traffic is coming from and how well my blog ads have been working. But have I been tracking the responses? Not so much. Well, not until the first monthly Business Building Day, that is! Ive literally just spent the last 2 hours pulling lots of data, from the number of consultation calls I need to conduct in order to get 1 sign-up to the average price Im getting per session from all the clients I have in my system. Everything was looking good or at least sensical when I decided to put together my Consultation Call Client Referrer Info spreadsheet, which is where the mind-blowing part of this title comes in. Im gonna draw out the suspense and break it down for ya with the highlights: 41 of my clients (44% of my clients) didnt have a consultation call. I think this had a lot to do with my scholarship program, since I communicated with all of em via e-mail and videos. There have been a handful that did sign-up just via the PayPal buttons on my Services page without having spoken to me before, and those came from a few different sources: blog mentions, guest posts, or meeting me somewhere directly. The bottom line is that they felt they knew what they were getting themselves into by what I put out there online and in person. In other words, I tricked em real good. The #1 source that a client put down as a referral washeres the mind-blowing part.Twitter. Yes, Twitter! I know, I know they probably didnt come directly from Twitter, they probably got pointed to me somehow a bit more directly, but the main part is: They remember meeting me on Twitter. So if anyone talks badly about my boyfriend (aka Twitter) again (that means you, Luke!), I will cut them. The #2 client referral was.are you still sitting down?.the Blogging Your Way e-course. Its hilarious because I had no marketing tactics when I first took that e-course in 2009, but when I got there I soon realized I was 1 life/career coach in a sea of creatives. It was a goldmine not only in making my own blog better, but in finding out where those ideal clients hang out (and yes, if youre my client you came to me from Blogging Your Way, youre totally ideal!). I think this is also interesting since it was personally driven by me putting myself out there, doing the work, interacting, yada yada y ada. Sound familiar to the way my boyfriend works? Thought youd like to see the breakdown here, which I did by categories to make life easier for all of us. Oh, and I kept in the no-show column, since I wanted to see if there was a correlation between where peeps come from if that plays a part in standing me up (thankfully, I have a low number of stand-ups, unless you count my husband, whos always trying out one joke or another (ba dum bum!)). I sorted it from the most client referrals to the least, and youll notice another interesting piece once the categories came into play blogs were my #1 referrer all around!: So basically, its a 1-2-3 punch of hitting The Blogosphere, SocialMediaLand and the PersonalRecommendationsUniverse. Youll notice that the Personal/Blog category, in which I knew the person that referred me but not the method, might boost up the Personal category to #2 or bring the #1 blog category even further up. But the bottom line is this: Marketing works best when youre not there to market yourself. Only about a quarter of me is on Twitter to market myself, while the other 3/4 of me is there to meet like-minded people, provide resources, build relationships, connect. I took Blogging Your Way because I wanted to make my blog better, and found more of the same (like-minded people, resources, building relationships, connecting). I get my personal referrals from a mix of clients, friends (both real online), and strangers who saw my stuff somewhere pass it along to their peeps, but when Im talking with, say, the Spring gals Im not doing so to sell myself Im there to (say it with me) meet like-minded people, provide resources, build relationships, connect. Im even here, now, on my blog to do well, I wont say it again. And while Ill still continue to run ads on blogs that I feel come from a similar heartspace (did I just say heartspace?! Hippy-dippy alert!), Im certainly not ordering another batch of postcards or sweating about Google Ads (which I ran for a short period of time th ey were so freakin worthless). I always say that Im nothing if not a relationship-builder, and this mind-blowing chart just confirms that what wakes me up in the morning is bringing the right peeps (seriously, my clients are the bomb!) to my door / phone/ email. Which makes me really wanna ask you, despite the fact that this isnt Tough (Question) Tuesday: What are you good at? What comes naturally to you? Why are you here? Then get thee to the places that let you be that and forget about the slimy sales piece. As my chart tells ya, sliminess isnt what sells. Being you does.